Please abstain from propagating the "both sides" nonsense.
One can admit to degrees of model uncertainty without insinuating that climate change is a matter of opinion.
One can admit to degrees of model uncertainty without insinuating that climate change is a matter of opinion.
You talk about the russian roulette with climate, but the issue is far more complicated. There are bunch of other russian roulettes to consider with policy and society. What if society needs carbon to run the economy and keep the jobs and peace? What if oil-dependent countries collapse and turn to war, terrorism or mass-migration? Those are substantial risks that can kill many people and affect the quality of life for the worse globally too. You see what happened in France when they raised the fuel tax. It's not hard to imagine some worse scenarios.
Did you listen when they agreed that proposed measures will not stop ocean water levels from rising? Did you listen to the cost-benefit analysis and socio-economic impact? Why are you ignoring this point? You don't think it's important?
If climate models are as likely to undershoot then how do you explain that ALL the best models in consideration overshot the last 30 years and not a single model undershot? If it was just as likely shouldn't we be seeing some models undershooting?
Yes, every climate model overshot air warming leading up to 2014. But they also all undershot ocean warming. That's because, for some reason nobody understands, from 1998 to 2014 all the extra thermal energy caused by CO2 forcing went into the ocean. But since 2014 air temperatures have shot up very rapily and now we're back on the trend-line predicted by models.[1] But really, you could just as easily have argued that models were undershooting because they all predicted cooler oceans than we got. And Ocean warming is the important part for determining sea levels. Christy was dishonestly cherry picking stats to make it look like errors only go in one direction when really they go in both.
If all you know about the global warming debate is what was in that video I can see how you found it convincing but it's actually a very shallow treatment of the whole topic. It's really hard to get into depth in a video, that why so many of us are reluctant to watch them when someone links to one.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
EDIT: And in the future, can you try summarizing things from a video like this you found persuasive rather than just telling people to watch the video? If you had mentioned the "Overshot for the last 30 years" thing it should have been immediately obvious to people who follow climate science what was happening and how you'd been mislead. Then I wouldn't have had to wade through an hour long video trying to figure out what you found persuasive in it. I'm generally reluctant to watch videos linked off of Hacker News because they usually aren't worth it and after this I think people are going to find it even harder to persuade me to do so without better evidence.
You can't just say Christy was dishonestly cherry-picking, because those data points are what was represented in the IPCC reports as concerning. They are the important data points that dictate the policy, not the undershooting data points. IPCC already cherry-picked these data points with the overshoot to raise the alarm.
Things I found persuasive? You are suggesting the the video represents only one side. This is a debate and both sides raised valid questions. You are exactly what they talked about when asked if they feel embarrassed by the tribal behaviour on either side.
The big picture seems pretty certain tho